Looking back at my 2020 marketing plan makes me laugh now

I was still treating our AI content generator like a fancy spell check, just fixing grammar on human written posts. The real shift happened last year when we started feeding it our full customer data, not just blog topics. Our email open rates jumped from 18% to 34% in six months because the subject lines finally felt personal. People still think AI is just for writing faster, but it's really for understanding your audience deeper. Has anyone else seen a big win from changing how you feed data into your tools?

4 comments

4 Comments

keithwalker3mo ago

Sounds like you just had bad data before, not a bad tool.

richard_shah1mo ago

Ngl feeding the tool actual behavior data was a game changer for me too. I started dumping in clickstream logs and past purchase records from my store and the AI started predicting which products people would actually buy next. Before that I was just giving it product descriptions and it kept suggesting the same boring upsells. Once it had real user patterns it figured out stuff I never would have spotted like how people who buy one backpack type almost always grab a specific water bottle within 2 weeks.

noah9171mo ago

Wait, you're saying feeding it customer data doubled your open rates from 18 to 34 percent? That's wild, I don't think I've ever seen a jump that big just from changing the data input. @the_skyler is totally right though, the tool's whole behavior shifts based on what you give it, it's not just about having more data but the right kind. I mean, I've messed around with feeding my own AI tool different things and the results were night and day when I started giving it actual customer behavior instead of just product descriptions. It's crazy how many people still think AI is just a fancy grammar checker when it's basically a mind reader if you feed it the right stuff. What kind of customer data did you use, like purchase history or browsing patterns or something else?

the_skyler3mo ago

But isn't the whole point that the tool shapes what you even consider to be data? Before, they were just feeding it blog drafts, so the AI only learned how to fix sentences. When they switched to customer info, the tool suddenly had the raw material to actually learn about people. It's less about having bad data and more about feeding it the right kind of stuff to begin with.